“Bergasse turned to me as soon as we were alone. ‘There is something dreadful about to happen,’ said he, in a solemn whisper. ‘She has had her _pressentiment_ to-night, and she has never deceived us yet. Something awful is about to occur here; in this very apartment, perhaps—in this very room, upon the very spot where we now are standing!’ He seized my arm and drew me nearer to his side, then added—‘My dearest friend, some one is about to DIE beneath this very roof!’ I drew back aghast; but Bergasse seemed too much _exalté_ by his subject to care if even he himself were the victim, provided the prophecy of his divinity came true. ‘Yes,’ added he, with a grim smile, ‘_she_ has felt that death is walking amongst us; he is now, at this moment, choosing his victim. She has insisted on my sending home my nephew. She wished me to depart also, but I must not leave her. Even while I am dallying with you, I am losing the precious words which fall with such sweet unction from her tongue.’ “He left me abruptly, and hurried back to the boudoir of Madame de Krudener, while I remained lost in astonishment, to think that the man, who had once dealt terror into the heart of the boldest satirist that ever existed—he who had for awhile, by his energy and sarcastic bitterness alone, arrested the headlong progress of Beaumarchais, and turned the popular tide of ridicule against him who had so long ridiculed all things with impunity, should have thus become, in his old age, the puling slave of a self-deluded impostor, who was prompted in the comedy she was playing by the wild vagaries of the ex-tailor, Jüng Stilling. I left the soirée with feelings of mingled pity and disgust, to which was added, a strange suspicion concerning the motive which actuated the ‘white angel of the north’ in thus making this public display of his admiration of the prophetess, and consenting to be made one of the _coryphées_ in the theatrical representations she was thus in the habit of giving. “I was scarcely awake the next morning, when Bergasse rushed into my room, exclaiming, in a tone of triumph, ‘She did not deceive—it was true—the _pressentiment_ was justified! Why did you not stay till later?—you would have _seen_ the truth with your own eyes, and have been an unbeliever no longer.’ With the artful tact of a professed marvel-monger, he allowed me time for reflection after he had pronounced these words, and then resumed, as soon as he perceived that I had collected my wandering senses.